Skeptics who don't believe people will use Apple's iPad to read books may have to rethink their position today, after Amazon showed off a pretty impressive Kindle app for the iPad and other tablet computers. Kindle for tablets is both a reading app and a bookstore, allowing you to instantly purchase books as well providing a fancy-shmancy touch-screen interface for reading them.
Like Kindle for the iPhone, this version will sync purchases and where you are in a book across different devices. Unique to the tablet edition, however, are both a page-turning animation and full-color photographs, something obviously not available on the grayscale screen of the Kindle itself.
You have to wonder though whether Amazon isn't taking a bit of a risk simply by making an app with such obvious appeal. With such a compelling application, full of multimedia possibilities, who but the most conservative of techie book lovers is going to want to read on a black-and-white eInk screen when they can not only get full colour on an tablet, but all the other things it does too: web surfing, games, email, apps etc. It seems quite plausible that Kindle for tablets that will make Kindle 2 itself a much less appealing proposition.
Wired
About the Author
Navneet Alang is a Toronto-based technology and culture writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Republic and The Globe and Mail. Between 2010 and 2011 he wrote technology commentary for TECHi on Apple, cloud video and the future of the desktop computer.
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